Education Week Teacher Assistant Editor Madeline Will, along with other contributors, explores the latest news, ideas, and resources for teacher leaders. Coverage runs the gamut from the inspirational to the infuriating, from practical classroom tips to raging policy debates.

April 13, 2015

A recent report suggested that districts could cut costs by increasing salaries for effective teachers who are willing to take on larger classes, but a review of that report says that the idea has significant flaws.

April 23, 2012

Covering a recent panel discussion at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute on technology and education reform, Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Maureen Downey notes that, for some experts, one of the key promises of digital-learning technology is that it could give more students access to the best ...

August 03, 2011

In an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times, Ellie Herman, a charter school teacher in South Los Angeles, takes on the now-trending argument that great teachers can make up for larger class sizes. That view, she says, essentially romanticizes the practice of great teaching and disregards the diversity and c...

June 20, 2011

In an opinion piece published by the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peter Smagorinsky, a professor of English education at the University of Georgia, questions the value of recent policy reports showing that increases in class sizes do not have a detrimental effect on student test scores. Most peo...

May 12, 2011

With some 6,000 New York City teaching jobs on the chopping block, Chester E. Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, reassures Gothamites that teacher layoffs aren't necessarily bad for education, so long they aren't seniority-based. Resulting increases in class sizes, he argues, can be...

March 28, 2011

In a Washington Post op-ed this morning, Eva Moskowitz, the founder and chief executive of the Success Charter Network, argues that class-size reduction efforts take away from schools' capacity for innovation and teacher support:
Obsession with class size is causing many public schools to look l...

March 02, 2011

Responding to the Bill Gates-generated class-size kerfuffle, education writer Dana Goldstein allows that there is little proven correlation between small class sizes and student performance. But, she notes, there's more to the issue than just test scores:
The problem [with increasing class sizes]...

January 18, 2011

Some teachers, students, and parents in Florida are less than satisfied with the virtual classrooms that are being used to deal with class size limitations, according to the New York Times.
In response to a 2002 amendment restricting the number of students in classroomsbut not virtual labs...